Asymmetrical Music

Asymmetrical Music

SOFA is very proud to present the new cd with Norwegian composer Eivind Buene and his composition, Asymmetrical Music. This is SOFA first release with a written score, but it doesn’t mean that improvisation is abandoned. On the contrary, Asymmetrical Music focuses on the meeting point between composition and improvisation. The two soloists, Ivar Grydeland – guitar and Ingar Zach – percussion, are improvising as a duo but also on another level, with the written score. The members of the Ensemble featured on this disc are also very capable improvisors at the same time being leading interpreters of contemporary music. Enjoy this astonishing work from Eivind Buene.

Cliché-free – no barren Nordic landscapes in view – and played with fresh enthusiasm, (thanks no doubt to the improvising guests, but also to the inaudible conductor who I think makes a series of quite important choices), this music draws equally from Schlippenbach and Schoenberg in a rarely achieved balance, fully of its time while aware of the different traditions from which it takes inspiration.

Percussionist Ingar Zach and guitarist Ivar Grydeland have a special understanding, as two earlier SOFA recordings of their freely improvised duets have shown. A close rapport of that kind can be exhilarating but it's undoubtedly healthy to disrupt it occasionally. That's effectively what was happening when they invited composer Eivind Buene to collaborate with them. Buene recognised «an opportunity to combine and juxtapose the different energies of improvisation and composition», and Asymmetrical Music, in nine movements, is the outcome. Recorded live in Oslo in 2004 the piece has Zach and Grydeland as soloists fronting a mixed ensemble of ten local musicians, conducted by Lene Grenager. The duo meet the challenge of this situation spectacularly well and it's a consistently absorbing release.
Buene selected his instrumentation imaginatively - a quartet of strings, a pair of reeds, electric guitar and piano, bass marimba and bagpipes. They are rarely heard as an ensemble but in shifting alignments, provoking the improvisors or meeting them on their own ground. Buene avoids any suggestion that this is a clash between predetermined orderliness and inspired spontaneity. Instead there are mobile structures that test the flexibility of the improvisors' customarily fragmented language, confronting them with contrasts, tensions and forms of coherence that require other kinds of response. In the course of the eighth of nine sections, a brief thunderous ensemble passage melts into a bizarre encounter between the string quartet, Grydeland's pulsating guitar harmonics, flurries of marimba and almost feline bagpipe wails. Fabulous.

More antiphonal than asymmetrical, Norwegian composer Eivind Buene’s nine-part double concerto juxtaposes two soloists’ improvisations within the stricture of a 12-piece chamber ensemble playing a notated score. Its success results not only from the bravura styling of percussionist Ingar Zach and Ivar Grydeland on guitar and banjo, but also from the sonic tension engendered from the backing group’s use of such non-standard chamber instruments as electric guitar, Fender Rhodes and bagpipes – as well as the expected strings and horns.
With the broken octave theme as an anchor, this tripled polyphony is toyed with and foreshadowed earlier on, then fulfilled at mid-point. Above a groundswell of massed, vibrating strings and puffing horns, Grydeland initially concentrates his strums and picking in the foreground as Zach abrasively pops and smacks abrasive surfaces. Reaching a climax with “Asymmetrical music V” and “VI”, intentions turn to elaborations as claw-hammer banjo lick become chromatic chording and the stolid percussion raps intensify to include rotated buzzes and scratches. Counterbalance is provided by, flat-line string obbligato, soon superseded by a melding of strummed electric piano, cymbal clacks, rim-shot reverb and thumping bass lines: the equivalent of a Free Jazz trio.
Unique elements are added in the final section as the music takes on processional qualities, with timbres resembling those of a radung’s blare and a pipa’s resonation. Tension-release is eventually achieved as choppy piano chords and contrapuntal marimba strokes intersect with conclusive guitar licks and measured drum beats.
This Asymmetrical Music may be irregular. Yet despite the title, it’s not lopsided but lucid.
— Ken Waxman